Mystery at Geneva Part 1

Mystery at Geneva.

by Rose Macaulay.

NOTE

As I have observed among readers and critics a tendency to discern satire where none is intended, I should like to say that this book is simply a straightforward mystery story, devoid of irony, moral or meaning. It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of Nations a.s.sembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on, actual conditions at Geneva, of which indeed I know little, the only connection I have ever had with the League being membership of its Union.

1

Henry, looking disgusted, as well he might, picked his way down the dark and dirty corkscrew stairway of the dilapidated fifteenth century house where he had rooms during the fourth (or possibly it was the fifth) a.s.sembly of the League of Nations. The stairway, smelling of fish and worse, opened out on to a narrow cobbled alley that ran between lofty mediaeval houses down from the Rue du Temple to the Quai du Seujet, in the ancient wharfside quarter of Saint Gervais.

Henry, pale and melancholy, his soft hat slouched over his face, looked what he was, a badly paid newspaper correspondent lodging in unclean rooms. He looked hungry; he looked embittered; he looked like one of the under dogs, whose time had not come yet, would, indeed, never come. He looked, however, a gentleman, which, in the usual sense of the word, he was not. He was of middle height, slim and not inelegant of build; his trousers, though shiny, were creased in the right place; his coat fitted him though it lacked two b.u.t.tons, and he dangled a monocle, which he screwed impartially now into one brown eye, now into the other. If any one would know, as they very properly might, whether Henry was a bad man or a good, I can only reply that we are all of us mixed, and most of us not very well mixed.

Henry was, in fact, at the moment a journalist, and wrote for the _British Bolshevist_, a revolutionary paper with a startlingly small circulation; and now the reader knows the very worst of Henry, which is to say a great deal, but must, all the same, be said.

Such as he was, Henry, on this fine Sunday morning in September, strolled down the Allee Pet.i.t Chat, which did not seem to him, as it seems to most English visitors, in the least picturesque, for Henry was a quarter Italian, and preferred new streets, and buildings to old. Having arrived at the Quai du Mont Blanc, he walked along it, brooding on this and that, gazing with a bitter kind of envy at the hotels which were even now opening their portals to those more fortunate than he--the Bergues, the Paix, the Beau Rivage, the Angleterre, the Russie, the Richemond. All these hostels were, on this Sunday morning before the opening of the a.s.sembly, receiving the delegates of the nations, their staffs and secretaries, and even journalists. Crowds of little grave-faced j.a.ps processed into the Hotel de la Paix; the entrance hall of Les Bergues was alive with the splendid, full-throated converse of Latin Americans ("Ah, they live, those Spaniards!" Henry sighed); while at the Beau Rivage the British Empire and the Dominions hastened, with the morbid ardour of their race, to plunge into baths after their night journey.

Baths, thought Henry bitterly. There were no baths in the Allee Pet.i.t Chat. All his bathing must be done in the lake--and cold comfort that was. Henry was no lover of cold water: he preferred it warm.

These full-fed, well-housed, n.o.bly cleaned delegates.... Henry quite untruly reported to his newspaper, which resented the high living of others, that some of them occupied as many as half a dozen rooms apiece in the hotels, with their typists, their secretaries, and their sycophantic suites.

Even the journalists, lodging less proudly in smaller hotels, or in apartments, all lodged cleanly, all decently, excepting only Henry, the accredited representative of the _British Bolshevist_.

Bitterly and proudly, with a faint sneer twisting his lips, Henry, leaning against the lake-side parapet, watched the tumultuous arrival of the organisers of peace on earth. The makers of the new world. What new world? Where tarried it? How slow were its makers at their creative task! Slow and unsure, thought Henry, whose newspaper was not of those who approved the League.

With a sardonic smile Henry turned on his heel and pursued his way along the Quai towards that immense hotel where the League Secretariat lived and moved and had its being. He would interview some one there and try to secure a good place in the press gallery. The Secretariat officials were kind to journalists, even to journalists on the _British Bolshevist_, a newspaper which was of no use to the League, and which the Secretariat despised, as they might despise the yapping of a tiresome and insignificant small dog.

2

The Secretariat were in a state of disturbance and expectation. The annual break in their toilsome and rather tedious year was upon them.

For a month their labours would be, indeed, increased, but life would also move. One wearied of Geneva, its small and segregated society, its official gossip, the Calvinistic atmosphere of the natives, its dreary winter, its oppressive summer, its eternal lake and distant mountains, its horrid little steamboats rushing perpetually across and across from one side of the water to the other--one wearied of Geneva as a place of residence. What was it (though it had its own charm) as a dwelling-place for those of civilised and cosmopolitan minds?

Vienna, now, would be better; or Brussels: even the poor old Hague, with its ill-fated traditions. Or, said the French members of the staff, Paris. For the French nation and government were increasingly attached to the League, and had long thought that Paris was its fitting home. It would be safer there.

However, it was at Geneva, and it was very dull except at a.s.sembly time, or when the Council were in session. a.s.sembly time was stimulating and entertaining. One saw then people from the outside world; things hummed. Old friends gathered together, new friends were made. The nations met, the a.s.sembly a.s.sembled, committees committeed, the Council councilled, grievances were aired and either remedied or not; questions were raised and sometimes solved; governments were pet.i.tioned, commissions were sent to investigate, quarrels were pursued, judgments p.r.o.nounced, current wars deplored, the year's work reviewed. Eloquence rang from that world-platform, to be heard at large, through the vastly various voices of a thousand newspapers, in a hundred rather apathetic countries.

In spite of the great eloquence, industry, intelligence, and many activities of the delegates, there was, in that cosmopolitan and cynical body, the Secretariat, a tendency to regard them, _en ma.s.se_, rather as children to be kept in order, though to be given a reasonable amount of liberty in such harmless amus.e.m.e.nts as talking on platforms. Treats, dinners and excursions were arranged for them; the Secretariat liked to see them having a good time. They would meet in the a.s.sembly Hall each morning to talk, before an audience; n.o.ble sentiments would then exalt and move the nations and be flashed across Europe by journalists. But in the afternoons they would cross the lake again to the Palais des Nations, and meet in Rooms A, B, C, or D, round tables (magic phrase! magic arrangement of furniture and human beings!) in large or small groups, and do the work. The a.s.sembly Hall was, so to speak, the front window, where the goods were displayed, but where one got away with the goods was in the back parlour. There, too, the fiercest international questions boiled up, boiled over, and were cooled by the calming temperature of the table and the sweet but firm reasonableness of some of the representatives of the more considerable powers. The committee meetings were, in fact, not only more effective than the a.s.sembly meetings, but more stimulating, more amusing.

Henry, entering the Palais des Nations, found it in a state of brilliant bustle. The big hall hummed with animated talk and cheerful greetings in many tongues, and members of the continental races shook one another ardently and frequently by the hand. How dull it would be, thought Henry, if ever the Esperanto people got their way, and the flavour of the richly various speech of the nations was lost in one colourless, absurd and inorganic language, stumblingly spoken and ill understood.

Henry entered a lift, was enclosed with a cynical American, a brilliant-looking Spaniard, a tall and elegant woman of a.s.surance and beauty, and an intelligent-faced cosmopolitan who looked like a British-Italian-Latin-American-Finn, which, in point of fact, he was.

Alighting at the third floor, Henry found his way to the department he required and introduced himself to one of its officials, who gave him a pink card a.s.signing him to a seat in the press gallery, which he felt would not be one he would really like.

"You've not been out here before, have you," said the official, and Henry agreed that this was so.

"Well, of course we don't expect much of a show from your fanatical paper...." The official was good-humoured, friendly, and tolerant.

The Secretariat were, indeed, sincerely indifferent to the commentary on their proceedings both of the _Morning Post_ and the _British Bolshevist_, for both could be taken for granted. One of these journals feared that the League sought disarmament, the other that it did not; to one it was a league of cranks, conscientious objectors, and (fearful and sinister word) internationals, come not to destroy but to fulfil the Covenant, bent on carrying out Article 8, subst.i.tuting judiciary arbitration for force, and treating Germany as a brother; to the other it was a league of militarist and capitalist states, an extension of the Supreme Allied Council, bent on destroying Article 18 and other inconvenient articles of the Covenant, and treating Germany as a dog. To both it was, in one word, Poppyc.o.c.k.

Sincerely, honestly, and ardently, both these journals thought like that. They could not help it; it was temperamental, and the way they saw things.

3

Henry descended the broad and shallow double stairway of the Palais des Nations, up and down which tripped the gay crowds who knew one another but knew not him, and so out to lunch, which he had poorly, inexpensively, obscurely and alone, at a low eating-house near the Secretariat. After lunch he had coffee at a higher eating-house, on the Quai, and sat under the pavement awning reading the papers, listening to the band, looking at the mountain view across the lake, and waiting until the other visitors to Geneva, having finished their more considerable luncheons, should emerge from their hotels and begin to walk or drive along the Quai. Meanwhile he read _L'Humeur_, which he found on the table before him. But _L'Humeur_ is not really very funny. It has only one joke, only one type of comic picture: a woman incompletely dressed. Was that, Henry speculated, really funny?

It happens, after all, to nearly all women at least every morning and every evening. Was it really funny even when to the lady thus unattired there entered a gentleman, either M. l'Amant or M. le Mari?

_Was_ only one thing funny, as some persons believed? Was it indeed really funny at all? Henry, who honestly desired to brighten his life, tried hard to think so, but failed, and relapsed into gloom. He could not see that it was funnier that a female should not yet have completed her toilet than that a male should not. Neither was funny.

Nothing, perhaps, was funny. The League of Nations was not funny. Life was not funny, and probably not death. Even the _British Bolshevist_, which he was reduced to reading, wasn't funny, though it did have on the front page a column headed "Widow's Leap Saves Cat from Burning House."

A young man sat down at Henry's little table and ordered drink; a bright, neat, brisk young man, with an alert manner. Glancing at the _British Bolshevist_, he made a conversational opening which elicited the fact that Henry represented this journal at Geneva. For himself, he was, it transpired, correspondent of the _Daily Sale_, a paper to which the _British Bolshevist_ was politically opposed but temperamentally sympathetic; they had the same cosy, chatty touch on life.

The two correspondents amused themselves by watching the delegates and other foreign arrivals strolling to and fro along the elegant s.p.a.ciousness of the Quai, chatting with one another. They noticed little things to write to their papers about, such as hats, spats, ways of carrying umbrellas and sticks, and so forth. They overheard fragments of conversation in many tongues. For, cl.u.s.tering round about the a.s.sembly, were the representatives, official and unofficial, of nearly all the world's nations, so that Henry heard in the s.p.a.ce of ten minutes British, French, Italians, Russians, Poles, Turks, Americans, Armenians, Dutch, Irish, Lithuanians, Serb-Croat-Slovenes, Czecho-Slovakians, the dwellers in Dalmatia and Istria, and in the parts of Latin America about Brazil, a.s.syrio-Chaldeans, and newspaper correspondents, all speaking in their tongues the wonderful works of G.o.d. Geneva was like Pentecost, or the Tower of Babel. There were represented there very many societies, which regularly settled in Geneva for the period of the a.s.sembly in order to send it messages, trusting thus to bring before the League in session the good causes they had at heart. The Women's International League was there, and the Esperanto League, and the Non-Alcoholic Drink Society, and the Mormons, and the Y.M.C.A. and the Union of Free Churches, and the Unprotected Armenians, and the Catholic a.s.sociation, and the Orthodox Church Union, and the Ethical Society, and the Bolshevik Refugees (for it was in Russia, at the moment, the turn of the other side), and the Save the Children Committee, and the Freemasons, and the Constructive Birth Control Society, and the Feathered Friends Protection Society, and the Negro Equality League, and the Anti-Divorce Union, and the Humanitarian Society, and the Eugenic Society, and the Orangemen's Union, and the Sinn Feiners, and the Zionists, and the Saloon Restoration League, and the S.P.G. And hundreds of Unprotected Minorities, irresistibly (or so they hoped) moving in their appeals.

Many of the representatives of these eager sections of humanity walked on the Quai du Mont Blanc on this fine Sunday afternoon and listened to the band, and b.u.t.tonholed delegates and their secretaries, and chatted, and spat. The Czecho-Slovakians spat hardest, the Costa-Ricans loudest, the Unprotected Armenians most frequently, and the Serb-Croat-Slovenes most accurately, but the a.s.syrio-Chaldeans spat farthest. The Zionists did not walk on the Quai. They were holding meetings together and drawing up hundreds of pet.i.tions, so that the a.s.sembly might receive at least one an hour from to-morrow onwards. Zionists do these things thoroughly.

Motor-cars hummed to and fro between the hotels and the Secretariat, and inside them one saw delegates. Flags flew and music played, and the _jet d'eau_ sprang, an immense crystalline tree of life, a snowy angel, up from the azure lake into the azure heavens.

Henry gave a little sigh of pleasure. He liked the scene.

"Will there be treats?" he asked his companion. "I like treats."

"Treats? Who for? The delegates get treats all right, if you mean that."

"For us, I meant."

"Oh, yes, the correspondents get a free trip or a free feed now and then too. I usually get out of them myself; official beanos bore me.

The town's very good to us; it wants the support of the press against rival claimants, such as Brussels."

"I should enjoy a lake trip very much," said Henry, beginning to feel that it was good to be there.

"Well, don't forget to hand in your address then, so that it gets on the list."

Henry was damped. 24 Allee Pet.i.t Chat, Saint Gervais--it sounded rotten, and would sound worse still to the Genevan syndics, who knew just where it was and what, and were even now engaged in plans for pulling down and rebuilding all the old wharfside quarter. No; he could not hand in that address....

"I suppose you've got to crab the show, whatever it does, haven't you," said the _Daily Sale_ man presently. "Now I'm out to pat it on the back--this year. I like that better. It's dull being disagreeable all the time; so obvious, too."

"My paper _is_ obvious," Henry owned gloomily. "Truth always is. You can't get round that."